050: The Best Writing Advice I've Ever Received
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The best writing advice i’ve ever received
Hi, Friends, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for listening. Just a reminder that if you do find this episode, or any of the episodes helpful, I would love it, if you could take a screenshot of the episode, and share it on Instagram and tag me. It's a great way to help other people discover the show and just means a lot to me. And it's also good for me to kind of hear like what episodes people are, you know, responding to. So if there's an episode that's been helpful for you, I'd love to know that it was helpful. Okay, this episode is going to be about the best writing advice that I have ever received. And this is, in a way, this was challenging for me to think of because I've gotten a lot of good writing advice over the years. But in a way it wasn't because this one piece of advice that I got was kind of the foundation for me completely changing my relationship to writing, changing how I wrote and it really, it really affected my writing. Like, there's a clear before and after, of when I learned this and before I learned this.
Yeah, it really changed things for me. So I'm excited to dive into this. Let me just kind of set the stage for you where I learned this and when I learned this in my writing life. So I started writing my, well, I started writing a few short stories, and then started writing a book in when did I start writing my book 2016, I believe is when I started writing my first book. And I didn't know anything about writing a book, I sort of had this assumption that because I was a huge reader. And because I was a good writer in other ways like in work and just any other. Any other writing, I was a solid writer, I assumed that I would just kind of know how to write a book and that that would translate automatically. And it did not. And that's part of why I started with some short stories is because a book felt really intimidating. And just to kind of clarify, I don't recommend that you do that. It's not like you have to write short stories before you write a book. And in fact, writing a short story is a completely different process. And it's actually in some ways, can be more difficult than writing a book. So just I don't I don't want to say that, like short stories are easier or that you have to start with something smaller before you can write a book. That's not it at all. That was that was just my experience. And again, I didn't know any better, I didn't know what I was doing.
So when I got the idea for the book, and I kind of started writing it, it, I just found it really hard. Very hard. I would sit with my laptop, I was in this apartment in DC, with my husband. In Washington DC, we had a one bedroom, there was no office, no desk. So I would just sit on the couch in the mornings with my laptop and try to write. And what I found is that it was so slow. I would have my laptop open for like 45 minutes, and I would write maybe, like 200 words, and it just felt agonizing. And I was like, Okay, I guess this is just writing, you know, this is just how it's going to be. It's gonna take me like six years to write this book. I'm gonna have to just, it's gonna be this torturous process. And part of me kind of was like, Oh, I recognize that like the tortured artist this this must just be what writing is. So I decided after, I don't remember exactly at what point I signed up for this class, but at some point early in the drafting process, I decided to take a class at a writing center. It was an it was in Bethesda, Maryland, which is you know, just outside of DC and took the metro to get there. It was snowy, I remember it. It just it it just snowed. So at some point in the winter, and it was a class. It was like a two hour workshop on basically how to write a novel. It was like a beginner workshop. It was this man that that taught it who had taught some classes at that writing center before and then had also published a few books in a series and yeah, I just kind of signed up for it because I was like, I don't really know what I'm doing. So I signed up for this class.
And there were some things in the class that were helpful some things that weren't But the best piece of writing advice that I got ended up being from that man in this class. And he said, to not, to let the rough draft be messy, to stop editing as you go. Focus on getting the words on the page, don't go back and edit. It's okay if the rough draft sucks. I had never heard that before. I had never heard anyone talk about that it was completely new to me. And it was earth shattering. Because I didn't even realize that I'd been doing this. But what I've been doing is agonizing over the best word to choose. When I was writing, I was agonizing over the perfect kind of sentence structure, I was agonizing over how to describe a character's hair color, or the sun shining through the window and doing it in a really beautiful way. I was just, and I would say, if I needed to research something, I would stop, I will Google and then I'd inevitably get distracted by something on, you know, the internet on Google. And he was saying, Don't do that. Just focus on getting the first draft out, it's gonna be shitty, it doesn't matter. No one's gonna read it. It's fine.
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So after that class, I focused on exactly that, I still, I wasn't implementing writing sprints. Back then writing sprints weren't something that I really discovered until I was working on my second book. So I was still, you know, writing and talking to my husband and petting the cat and trying to do all kinds of other things in the morning. So I still wasn't writing super quickly. But it was so much better than it was. And I'm going to talk about why this advice was so transformative, I'm going to give you a few kind of tangible things. And these are the reasons that I preach this advice. Now, the first thing that it did for me is it gave me permission to ignore my inner perfectionist, the what the the inner perfectionist that said, you can't move on until you find the perfect word. In this sentence, you can't move on until this line of dialogue is exactly the way that you want it to be. You can't move on until whatever it gave me permission to say like, you know what, I'm putting that voice to the side, I'm thank you for sharing, but I'm just gonna keep going anyways, even if it's not perfect. Even if I am tempted to go back and tweak it and change it, I'm just gonna ignore that. And I'm gonna keep moving forward. So it really helped quiet that inner voice that I had.
The second thing it did for me is it helped me write quicker, again I wasn't implementing writing sprints yet. So it wasn't, I wasn't writing as quickly as I did later. But it still helped me write a lot quicker. Because again, like I wasn't agonizing over word choice and trying to get everything perfect. As it came out of my head onto the page, it didn't matter. So I could just write a lot quicker and make a lot more progress. And that was cool. It was cool to see like me making so much progress. It was cool to see my word count increasing. And for me to really feel like I was making progress. You know, before if I only wrote like 3 or 400 words in a week, it was it was hard. I felt like it was again, it was kind of taking me like a decade to write a book and that wasn't, you know, it was hard. So I just I wrote a lot quicker and it was really motivating to see the word count increase.
The third thing that it did for me is it helped lessen my imposter syndrome because I didn't realize again, I didn't know that I was doing this. But I was I was feeling like I was doing it wrong, because it was so hard and my words weren't great. And, you know, I was comparing my first attempt at this, this rough draft to something that was published and polished and edited. And I was like, Oh, I'm such a terrible writer, like, everyone else is probably having such an easier time. Everyone else is such a better writer than I am. And it just made me realize, like, oh, everyone's rough draft is, needs work. Like, no one, just sits down at their computer, and writes a full novel, and then hit publish, and boom, that's it. So it really, it really helps me with this imposter syndrome that I was feeling.
And it sort of made me feel like I was in this boat with other writers that everyone, you know, kind of has a shitty rough draft. And that really made me feel a lot better about my writing skill. And it made me feel a lot better about the process overall. And because all of those things happened, it was easier for me to write after that point, again, still not great. It took me about two and a half, yeah, two and a half years to write that first book, which nothing wrong with that. It's great. I wrote a frickin book in two and a half years. That's amazing. And I learned so much along the way.. But then when it came time for me to write my second book, I was like, something's got to change. I don't want it to take two and a half years again, to get another book out. So that's when I really took this to heart. Like, let it be shitty. It doesn't matter if the rough draft is terrible. No one's ever going to see it. It's fine. I'm just discovering what the story is. And then I also halfway through that process started implementing writing sprints and just getting a lot faster. But yeah, the foundation for all of this was that writing class in Bethesda, Maryland, in the winter where I just got permission to let it be, you know, a rough draft and to not edit.
Thank you so much for tuning in.